Lately I’ve been back to photographing abandoned skyscrapers, the original basis of this site, something that I haven’t done since spring. So expect photo-heavy posts for a while.

I’ve grown weary and ambivalent about the whole activity of exploring and posting about it on a website. When I started a few years back, it was a relatively unique activity, with about three Detroit websites devoted to it, and a handful of people engaged in it. Most of the buildings we’d gone in had no graffiti, no infantile vandalism, no stripping of copper or architectural treasures, and some had no signs of entry in years. The whole point back then was to share something few people had seen. Not much need for me to do it if there are tons of sources out there now.

Now there are dozens of urban exploration websites in town, and nearly everyone with a flashlight and a vandalism streak has been through buildings that once were impervious to entry, unless of course you were a kid with a crowbar and an indifference to decorum, which seems to be the typical explorer nowadays.

And so the David Broderick Tower, with a once-pristine penthouse, is in ruins because of them. The David Whitney Building, for years sealed like a tomb, is wide open and replete with imbecilic graffiti. The train station is as accessible as it was when trains still deposited people there. So much for being unseen but by a few. Doors are pried and left open, and boards are ripped off windows, leaving buildings defenseless against the elements and crackheads seeking anything worth stripping and selling.

Though I never described how to get into any buildings, I take some share of the blame for publicizing this as something interesting to do. You try to share some beauty and it draws certain people who seek it out to destroy it. Didn’t quite expect that reaction. Not that I’ll stop going into some buildings; I just might be more careful what I post from now on so I don’t contribute to the problem. This website is broader in scope than that anyway; Detroit is so much richer than a handful of abandoned skyscrapers, no matter how spectacular and glamorous they are, or were. There are endless things to explore in this city, all sorts of enduring remnants of beauty, and countless mysteries to unravel.

Still, there was one building I hadn’t been in, a skyscraper that opened up recently by such happenstance as being attacked by demolition crews. So expect a flurry of posts about that one and some history about some others, with pictures of what little beauty remains untouched inside them.